← The Paid Search Podcast | A Weekly Podcast About Google Ads and Online Marketing
The Paid Search Podcast | A Weekly Podcast About Google Ads and Online Marketing
YouTube Campaigns Are Changing (Episode 457)
00:36:52
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Transcript6 lines
- [00:00]
Joey Bidner
Foreign.
- [00:21]
Chris Schaefer
Hello and welcome to the paid search podcast. My name is Chris and today we're going to talk about YouTube, we're going to talk about Google Ads, we're going to talk about all kinds of things. Stick around because I have my friend Joey Bidner here who's going to discuss some big changes coming to the YouTube campaign arena and also answer a question from Mark. And then towards the end of the show, I'm going to talk about a very important topic about can you compete with the big dogs? Can you compete with those big guys, deep pockets, how can you do it and why? I believe that even though the small budget out there is very limited, does have its limitations, you can still do it. You still have a place among all the big competitors, the big spenders. So before we jump into that, I want to tell you about my sponsor, optio.com PSP they are a long term sponsor of this show because I believe in this software. I believe in what it can do to help the big spender and the small spender. Whether you have one account that you're managing or 100 accounts, this campaign is designed to help you make critical decisions quickly and easily covering all aspects of your Google Ads account, whether it is the bid strategy, negative keywords, ad copy, looking at your search terms. In fact, there's something I've talked about recently using the N gram finder tool which identifies wasteful spin terms that this whole process simplifies the negative keyword process. Okay, so this, this can be true for search campaigns, shopping campaigns, and it even does performance max. This is a tool that helps you find those wasteful search terms that are wasting your money and identify them in bulk and make sweeping changes to your account very quickly. So if you'd like to try this for free, go to optio.com PSP for a 28 day free trial of the tool. This is an exclusive offer just from this podcast. You won't hear this offer anywhere el else because they are my only sponsor and I offer a special deal to try them because I believe in this software so much. And again, that's optio.com PSP to try it for free for 28 days. All right, so as I mentioned, I'm gonna have Joey here in a moment, but before I do, I have a question from Mark who writes in and you can also write in paid search podcastmail.com send your question there and I may answer it on the show. I try and answer all of the questions and today is no different. Mark says, chris, love the podcast. Your Insights have been a huge help. I have a specific question about bidding strategies for my Google Ads search campaign. I'm currently using Max CPC manual bidding, but I. I'm wondering if switching to target CPA would help improve conversions. My concern is that my industry has high cost per click, sometimes $20 and more per click. And I don't want Google to overspend trying to hit a CPA goal that might not be realistic. So here's the question. How do I, how do I determine if target CPA is the right move? Should I start with a higher CPA target and then lower it over time? Or is there a better way to transition from manual bidding to target CPA without losing control over my costs? Well, very good question mark. Thank you. Here is my suggestion. First about is it the right move? Right. So I've talked about this before. The right time to move to maximize conversions. Target CPA is later in the phase, particularly phase three of Google Ads, where you know you're in phase three when you have conquered these two things. Number one, the quality of traffic that you're getting is good. Okay? So you're your search terms. You know you're getting the right traffic and you're happy with the traffic that you are getting now. Phase two is when that good traffic is now leading to consistent conversions. Conversions that are coming in, they're not sporadic, they may not be enough. But phase two is when you're getting conversions and it's at least consistent. Now when you're ready to move into phase three is when those conversions come up so often, they're coming so quickly and so regularly that you're now actually starting to acquire a point of meeting your cost per acquisition goal. You're actually hitting enough conversions to make this profitable. Right? This is the place you want to be and hopefully stay in this phase three for a very long time. So if you're moving into phase three or you're already in phase three and you want to consider moving into target cpa, here's a very good method that I love to use. You go to your settings of your campaign and then you go down to your bidding and you choose from manual CPC to maximize conversions. Now, when you change bid strategies, there is an option for maximize conversions to hit a checkbox. Okay, you can hit the checkbox. The checkbox is called set a target cost per action. You can hit that checkbox and then you can put a number in there. If Google populates that blank with a number, there will be a suggested target cost per action number that it gives you. And if you like that number, if that number is 150 and you've been generating 180 cost per action and, and Google says it thinks it can maintain 150, or maybe you've been maintaining a 180 and it thinks it can maintain a 175 or even just a 180. Right. If it's at least acceptable from what you've been getting and you're willing to accept that, then I think it is the right move for you to consider moving to target cpa. Okay. Now, if this number is extremely high and it is not something you're happy with, then perhaps it's not a good time. So you would put this aside. Now, the question about whether you should start with a higher target CPA or a lower cpa, I think you should start with whatever that suggested is. But here's, here's where I differ from a lot of what other people suggest. I don't suggest that you jump straight into a target CPA from manual bidding. I suggest you launch an experiment. Run an experiment, actually, and this is a, this is not just creating another campaign. You're actually creating an experiment. It is a tool in Google Ads. There's an experiment tab in Google Ads where you can create an experiment and change that experiment campaign to a target CPA that Google's suggesting and then run that experiment directly against your manual. Okay. And here's what you want to look for. And if you guys want to hear a deeper in depth about how to analyze whether the manual is successful or the target CPA successful, I can get into that. You know, you can send your topic requests questions to me at the email I mentioned. So I won't get into it this time. But if you find it to be successful, you can then apply that experiment and move forward. It's really a very important point here is that I run plenty of experiments where I take my manual and I test it against the target CPA and it's great, it runs good. Other times it doesn't. Other times I'm seeing it basically get about the same and it's kind of a wash. I'm like, well, I don't really want to give up my bidding control for basically the same cost per acquisition, so I don't want to use it. And other times I have run it, seen that it's done very well and the client's extremely happy. And then this is, this is something I actually did a podcast about a couple months ago. I ran a target CPA campaign. It Looked great. I turned it on, I ran it, and the client sent me an email and said, something's changed, something's wrong. We're not closing leads anymore. I know your reports say that our leads have gone up 25%, but we're not closing leads anymore. And I had changed from manual to target CPA using the experiment, realized that it was doing better and gave a hundred percent of the budget to the target cpa. And then the client noticed a lead quality degradation. I say that right, A lead quality slip, lead quality drop. Trying to talk over my intelligence level, so forgive me to work on my vocabulary, but basically the quality of traffic was the same as far as I could tell. But the quality of leads dropped. So I went back to manual and guess what? Things got better. Okay, so there's a lot of things to consider. It is not just numbers on a screen. There's a lot of things to consider and you need to proceed cautiously because this is a big change. So thanks for your email. Great question. And I want to toss it now to Joey who is talking about changes that are coming to YouTube campaigns. Joey, go ahead.
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Joey Bidner
Hey, what's up, Chris? So today I wanted to talk about a change that Google recently made to YouTube campaigns that I think is particularly interesting because at face value, right away you might think it's a bad thing. But actually I want to peel the curtain back on how this is a change that I'm actually quite behind because Google for once gave us more control as they have changed a campaign type. So long story short, starting in April, we are no longer going to be able to create video for action campaigns. Okay? Now, Video for action campaign is one of the YouTube campaign types that essentially just uses automated bidding. There are those videos that you can add products under. If you want, you can attach your merchant center and it uses the automated bidding system to steer the delivery. Now, starting in April, we will no longer be able to create new ones and we will be forced to use Demand gen. Now, demand gen is essentially the higher funnel version of pmax. So instead of using search and shopping with display and video, it's using just video Discovery display. The higher funnel products of Google now, you might be thinking like, oh great, like they're essentially taking away our controls because pmax sucks. And I don't want my video campaigns to basically be like the video version of pmax. And that's where I'm actually going to push back because demand gen is very different than pmax and it actually has a lot of controls. And this change actually gives us more control over our video campaign, which is amazing. Now cutting straight to it. A video campaign in demand gen can be just video. It's not one of those campaign types where we're being forced to use the other channel types. And this is where Google really opened up our ability to control the campaign. In the ad group setting of your demand gen, you are able to see a breakdown for channels. Okay now in this channel breakdown you will see two options. All Google channels or Let me choose. Which is kind of funny how they said that when you click the let me choose option you get to see a large list of all these channels options given to us. Now the, the most exciting ones right out of the gate are the ability to turn off the Google display network so your ads are not going to show on the display network, which is like a spammy way for Google to make a bit of revenue by showing your video with no audio on display. And I will say actually that in video for action campaigns we didn't even have that option to turn it off. We had to kind of hack the system and include an exclusion with a piece of code. They turned that off. So they're already giving us more control. Then beyond that, you're able to turn off the Discovery network and turn off Gmail, which is also really cool because again I'm a pretty big fan of discovery. But previously a discovery campaign you couldn't turn off Gmail, you had Discovery which is like, it's like a Google Pixel. You see it on Pixel devices. It's like there scroll where your news and all your interests are. But it wasn't separate from Gmail. So what's cool is before we even get into video, if you did want to run discovery, we can at least turn off Gmail, which is really cool now. So you turn off all those. Now we're only on YouTube. Beyond that, the ad group level gives us the ability to control our YouTube's delivery between in stream, in feed and shorts, which is also huge because previously we didn't have that control. If you had a video for action campaign, it was rolled into all of them. Now to familiarize you, in stream is when your video, when your ad plays while someone's watching content, you get that like that ad that pops up and after five seconds somebody can skip it. That's In Stream. Then we have in feed, which is the ad types where it's a suggested video that's kind of like on the side panel and it's like in somebody's feed and then shorts, which are the Vertical format short, which is primarily delivered on mobile, also on desktop, primarily on mobile. So that alone also is an extra added feature because previously in order to, let's say show a video where you only wanted it on Shorts, you had to basically limit it to the mobile network as a short. And we just didn't have it this clear. So this is going to give us a lot of valuable control because each of these different channel types, even in Stream, in Feed and Shorts, sometimes certain pieces of creative resonate better for one channel versus the other or sometimes the performance is different between the different delivery types. Right. The CPMs will be cheaper on Shorts, but the click through rates will be higher on in feed or in, you know, so having that control is, is fantastic. Now again we have these controls at the ad group level, which is great because you don't need too much segmentation between your campaigns. You can control this within one campaign between your ad groups. Now taking things one step further, what I also like is they gave us that channel control of In Stream, in Feed and Shorts at the ad level. So with a demand gen campaign we can have up to five videos in one ad. And this is helpful because let's say you've got a series of different videos that don't need to be segmented by the ad group. Right? Like they go to the same page, they're saying the same thing in different ways. Well, when you upload all five of your videos, under each video you'll see a toggle or under all the videos you'll see toggle it says choose where your video will show you turn that on and then it enables this drop down under the video that says prefer on in Stream, Shorts or in Feed and you can select them. So you can have one set of ads and each video you can control how you want it to show. So I am really behind this change for once. It's kind of a relief that Google is giving us this control. And I want to also mention when it comes to targeting on demand gen, this is also very different than performance max. Right? Performance max, we don't really have strict targeting. If you give a performance max campaign an audience, it's not going to only target that audience. It uses it as a signal and then finds traffic. That's similar to. Right. And that's why pmax we can't use for only remarketing. You give PMAX campaign your remarketing lists, it's going to go beyond that with demand gen. It uses audiences in the traditional sense of targeting where you can use it for remarketing, you can use it for cold traffic that's going to only look at those in market or custom audiences. That alone has been the reason why I have been using Demand gen for YouTube remarketing for a while and I'm certainly going to be experimenting with using it for discovery, especially now that we could turn off Gmail. Discovery is a really powerful platform for inspiring action as well. Or I shouldn't say inspiring action. That's a bit vague for generating awareness for those brands that just need that awareness plug, but also for remarketing. So I really like this change and I think you will too. So I wanted to mention it and just remind you that as of April 2025 we won't be able to create these video for action campaigns in YouTube, but we will still have all the other types of YouTube campaigns. You still will have sequence non skippable ads. I really like sequence by the way, if give that a try. And then starting in June, I believe Google's going to take your current video for action campaigns and automatically turn it into a demand gen. So you can't get out of this one if you're new to YouTube and you want a little bit more context on the details of how to do the target strategy, how to do campaign structure and what types of videos you want to use that whole strategy. Chris and I did an episode on all of this, a full one hour episode where him and I are hashing out over YouTube and it's episode 431. So check out 431 if you want some insight on how to run YouTube ads. But I wanted to bring you all up to speed on this new change. So I hope that's helpful and I'll pass it back to you, Chris.
- [20:08]
Chris Schaefer
All right, thanks Joey. Great stuff. I want to wrap up the show with a discussion. As I teased at the top of the show, I want to talk about competing with the big dogs. How can small budgets still compete with big dogs? Can you? Is it even possible? And I'm going to talk about five excuses that people give about why, you know, they're concerned about it, you know, what their limitations are. I'm going to talk about those five things here in just a moment and remind you opteo.com PSP that is a special URL to take advantage of the special offer that you will only hear about here. I hear a lot of people say thank you so much for telling me about this tool. It has become a very important tool in my tool belt for Google Ads. And by the way Did I mention it does Google Ads and it also does Microsoft ads. So it is still a hundred percent focused on search traffic, paid search. You know, this is not a tool that, that, that promises to do all things and then does individual things very poorly. It is specifically focused on that and it does a great job at it. Much like me, I like to specialize. And these guys are truly a specialty tool. You will love this tool. You can try it for free for 28 days. Use the chat box in the bottom right of the screen to tell them you heard about it from Chris Schaefer on the paid search podcast and you'll get that special offer. All right. Competing with deep pockets, competing with the big dogs, competing with those competitors that seem absolutely daunting. You're a small fish surrounded by big fish. There's no chance you can compete with these guys. Right? Right. Well, let's go through the reasons why that is usually said. So number one, no one will see my ad. Low visibility of my ad makes it impossible for me to compete against these big players. Okay, all right. I absolutely understand that. But let me make something very clear. No player controls 100% of the market. No advertiser gets much more than a few percentage points of the total clicks. Anybody who runs a Google Ads campaign for anything non brand, what's your typical click through rate? Typical click through rate is in the single digits, maybe the low double digits. Maybe some of you can brag about a 20% click through rate but typically very high click through rates then leads to what A very low impression share. So in other words, you're covering very little of the market. So maybe you're getting a lot of clicks at a very high rate, but you don't actually have the budget to cover cover very much of it. So it's always going to be a back and forth. Nobody can afford to get all the clicks all the time. And then also people that have a huge budget only end up getting single digit percentage of the market clicks because people end up not clicking on their ad and clicking on organic or some other thing, or not clicking on anything at all and just doing a different search. Okay, so this is not a factor. But let me give you some advice on what you can do to address this low visibility concern about no one will see my ad. So start with this, start with your best advantage. If you're in a position, if you're in a specific industry, start with a specific advantage that you have over competitors. Okay. And I'll give you a couple examples just off the top of my head if I, if I were to advertise my, my business, okay, I'm a Google Ads manager and there are a lot of Google Ads managers. And if I were to decide to run a Google Ads campaign for me, I would focus on the fact that I am not a team. That's actually an advantage of what I do. I'm not a team. I'm not an agency. You get to work with me, a freelancer. And a lot of people like that, okay? A lot of people seek after those smaller, more organic relationships with their manager. And that's an advantage that I have over. No agency, no big deep pocketed company can provide that type of intimate management environment that I can. So I lean into that and my visibility suddenly of something they're not able to get or really capitalize on suddenly skyrockets. I'm able to capitalize on that very specific advantage. Okay? So choose a target that is important for your business and lean into that and people will see your ad. Because there are people. Why are there shelves and shelves and shelves of different breakfast cereals? Because people don't eat. Just eat it for breakfast. People don't eat the same thing. People want something healthy. People want something with sugar. People want something for their kids. People want something for dessert. Right? People want something to help them with this and that. There's options because everyone has a motivation for something different in your adult can capitalize on that. So if you think your small budget won't work, start with your advantage and move forward from there. Don't just put the keyword. Don't you know, I cannot advertise for.
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Joey Bidner
For.
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Chris Schaefer
For just Google Ad services. What a horrible keyword. For me to choose as a business, I need to choose something like Google Ads Freelancer, Google Ads Specialist. You know, something like that. You know, something that indicates this is a consultant, a specific knowledgeable person and not a team. Right? Google Agency is absolutely something I would not ever try and capitalize on. Okay, number two, next concern. I can't compete with their bids. Chris. Chris. I can't compete with their bids. The cost per click is too expensive for me to compete. Okay, all right, so let's go through why this concern is not true. Number one, you do not have to be first to get a qualified click. There are plenty of clicks that come in that do not click on the first click. In fact, if you are first in the paid search results, often you get a lot of unqualified clicks. I call them instaclicks, people who just search and then just Click the first thing. Don't believe me? Run on competitor ads and watch how many people search for your competitor's name and then click on your ad and then never call you, never fill out a form. And then you start to realize, right, do that for a couple years. Spend a couple tens of thousands of dollars on that and waste that money. And then realize, why are these people clicking on my ad? I am services abc, but I'm advertising on services xyz. That's my competitor's name. People are searching for my competitor. They see that I'm ABC company, but they're looking for xyz, then they're not calling me. Why? That should tell you something. That should tell you that people insta click. People just click. They don't realize they're spending money. They don't realize that you're. That this is a paid ad. They don't realize that you're not the competitor. Why? Because they're not actually reading the ad copy. They're just insta clicking. That's all they're doing. Okay, so the one thing you should focus on is get your ads above organic. Get your ads above that organic ranking. Make sure they're visible. In other words, get your impression. Top percentage. That's a specific metric. It's in the con, it's in the performance columns, and it's called impression top. Get your impression. Top percentage above 50%. Don't try and be first, but at least make it visible. Try and get your impression. Top percentage above 50%. Make sure you're visible. So you'll be above organic but not in first position. Your CPCS will be a little less expensive that way. Be a little more affordable. Number three, I can't compete with their budget. Chris. My, my ads stop by lunchtime. My ads cut off. Okay, this is 100% not true. Your ads do not just shut off by lunch. Google takes a budget that's too low and spreads it across the day. So you might show for this search and then 50 searches go by and then you show up for another search and then 50 more searches go by and you show up for another search, right? They're spreading your budget across the entire day as evenly as they can. So you'll get clicks kind of all through the day. Eventually. That may not happen on day one as Google starts to figure out your budget. But you don't just shut off at a certain time. That is old school Google Ads. There was a setting in Google Ads called aggressive, I think it was called, where it would run full out until it ran out of budget. That was actually a setting you could use. Of course that's gone because why give us an opportunity to make a decision like that? Of course not. We, we couldn't make the right decision. Right. Google. But anyway, the option's gone. So that's not true. And if you think that's the case, if you, if you do see that happening, limit your ads 8 to do 8. 8am to 1pm okay. Run your ads at a shorter time. Try a smaller geographic area. Limit your geographic targeting. Make your, your, your targeting a little more, little more targeted in some areas. Instead of doing the entire state, do a couple counties. Instead of targeting the biggest counties in the state, try targeting some specific cities or zip codes, you know, around a certain area. Another thing, pick better keywords. Be more specific with your keywords. Use exact match keywords. Very important. And then use more negative keywords. Block searches that are not relevant. There's always wasted searches that are coming through. Use negative keywords to block those. All right, Number four, Chris, they have an advantage with Google. Google favors higher spending advertisers. Right? I've heard that. I saw that on a, on, on, on an article once. It's not true. Okay? The truth about that is it's not true. I see plenty of small spinning accounts with amazing results every day. I work with them, I consult on them, I look at them. I do audits on a lot of accounts. Plenty of small spinning accounts do phenomenally well. It's absolutely not true that you have to have a big spinning account to be successful. 100% not true. Okay. Spending more on Google does not provide better results. I actually get this question a lot. People say, kris, should I spend more to get more conversions? And I always give them the answer they're not expecting. No, you should not spend more to get more conversions. You spend more to get more clicks and hope that leads to conversions. How do you get more conversions? Well, you optimize your campaign until it's as optimize as best you can. Then you increase the budget and continue optimizing. The fact is, is that typically I see the biggest spenders on Google waste more than the small spenders. It's the people that watch their pennies that do better than the people that just watch their tens of thousands go by. Big budgets usually make a lot of compromises and they do not have an advantage. The only advantage they have is that they have more opportunity to spend and not necessarily spend smarter. Number five, Chris, I don't have a marketing team. I don't have the same Google support or the advanced tools that these big companies have. All right, so let me clear the air on this. The free Google support that is offered from Google, the, the Google reps is not an advantage. It is not something that is going to bring you to the next level. Okay? The, the anything that is free is typically worth the price that it's given, right? If you want quality, you expect to pay, right? Hey, I, I have this, I have a free car for you, and I have a car that cost $80,000. Which one do you think is probably a better quality vehicle for you? You pay for what you get. And I don't think that the free support from the Google team members is something that is going to bring you to a new level and make you a higher level of efficiency. And then further upon that is, I don't think any advanced tool is absolutely necessary to measure success in your Google Ads. I don't think in order to reach the next level, you have to have highly expensive, highly technical tools. These, there are tools out there that. Do you know they're purported power tools of Google Ads. And I'm not talking about Optio. I like Optio because it's very small and compact and works and does a specific thing for you. What I'm talking about are these big tools that cost thousands and thousands of dollars and come with support teams and you know, just, you literally have to take a training course on how to use them that I don't find to be useful. What you need is simple. You don't have a marketing team. You don't have all the advantages of these big spenders. Here's here, here's, here's, here's what you focus on. Conversion tracking. Get your conversion tracking working. Track your web forms, your phone calls, your purchases. Right? Track what's important and nothing else. And then review your search terms, not your keywords. Review your search terms. Make sure your traffic is going to the people that need to see it, people that you're interested in selling to make sure that's where your traffic is going. Right? That's the only kind of tracking and advanced tools that you need as a small business and grow from there. Eventually, maybe you'll be a big spender, but honestly, I see plenty of success with small spend and it does. Google Ads is a massive success for them, even at a small spend. And with that, I thank you guys for listening to this podcast. My name is Chris Schaefer. You can find me@chrishaefer.com and catch you guys next week.